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London 2012: ‘I’ll be back,’ Paula Findlay vows

After heartbreaking last-place finish in triathlon, former world No. 1 dries her tears and starts looking forward.

Paula Findlay suffered through a demoralizing last-place finish in the triathlon at her first Olympics but is determined to bounce back and looking forward to the world championship in October in New Zealand.
(Robyn Doolittle / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

LONDON—On the morning after the worst day of her young life, Paula Findlay awoke to the usual craving: She felt like going for a run.

It was less than 24 hours earlier that she had stepped upon her sport’s biggest stage and come unravelled in front of the world. In a torturous Olympic triathlon debut, after a hard year marred by an injury to her hip and acrimony with her coach, she failed to find the racing legs that once made her the world’s No. 1-ranked triathlete. When she crossed the finish line in last place, she cried and she apologized.

Perhaps lesser athletes would have gone on a bender or curled up in bed until September. Findlay made a beeline to Hyde Park. Back on the course where she’d just suffered her setback, she went jogging alone on a peaceful Sunday.

“It was good to get back out there the next day,” Findlay, 23, said. “I’d won a race there two years ago. I was thinking, ‘This is a good place. I won here.’ That brought back good memories. … I’m not going to leave here all bitter, ‘I hate London. I hate this course. And I’m never coming back.’

“I’ll be back.”

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There’s a reason why Simon Whitfield, the two-time medallist in Olympic triathlon, calls Findlay “the red-headed assassin.” Steely resolve and fearlessness are central to her fibre. Still, when Findlay sat down for an interview on Saturday at a coffee shop not far from the athletes’ village, it was clear she remained deeply hurt by her Olympic experience. She said she feels “like a different person” than the athlete who reeled off five International Triathlon Union wins and shot to the top of the world rankings in the two-year lead-up to London. And while she said she appreciates the many messages of support she has received — she’s touched that people are lauding her for finishing a race in which she so clearly suffered emotionally and physically — she points out that she didn’t come here “just to experience the Games and get the clothes.”

“I came here to win a medal,” she said. “My confidence is shattered. When you come last at the Olympics, your confidence is shot. That’s just how it is.”

“I’m happy he said it,” Findlay said. “It was bizarre timing, the day before he raced at the Olympics. But, you know, he’s helped me out so much. I couldn’t be here without Simon.”

She came here without Patrick Kelly, who was her coach from 2010 until he quit a couple of months before the Games. Findlay said the breakup was a long time coming. Even when she was winning races, it wasn’t a smooth partnership. But she said she stuck with Kelly at first because she was having success and then, when she suffered the hip injury, in part because the government-funded Own the Podium program supported Kelly’s training plan. She said she and her former coach were a mismatched pairing. She described Kelly as quiet; she acknowledged she’s the same way. Things that needed to be said never were.

“It was just a hard relationship. We just didn’t get along. We’ve had issues with communication for two years,” Findlay said of Kelly. “But I have to take a bit of the blame myself. … But I put my trust and faith in these experts. I kept, like Simon said, ramming into a brick wall, backing up, ramming into it again. I’d get a little bit better, but we’d just go right back into (hard training) and I’d get injured again.

“Part of that is me, and my desire to train hard. … (But) I think it’s the role of the team that you’re working with to pull you back a little bit, and to build up slowly, so that you can appropriately come back from an injury. I think that the plan that was put in place and the approach to my health was a little bit mismanaged, I suppose. But again, I have to take some of the hit for that. It’s my own body, and it’s my own injury, and I’m the only one that knows truly how my hip feels. But I was never dishonest about it. I was open.”

It’s hardly uncommon for triathletes to bounce from coach to coach. Whitfield has employed a long list of different ones during his career, even making switches after some of his biggest triumphs. Still, the timing of Kelly’s departure was hardly ideal.

“Two months before the Olympics, changing coaches — don’t do that. I don’t recommend it,” she said. “But I had to. I was stuck.”

When Findlay details her pre-Olympic training, it’s pretty easy to understand why she didn’t contend for a medal. Findlay’s injury left her physically unable to run — like, not a step without what she called “sharp pain” — for most of the first half of this year. It was only in late May, after she began working with Whitfield’s physiotherapist Marilyn Adams, that she found some relief.

At that point, because she had followed Whitfield to his training base in Hamilton, Findlay began taking guidance from Whitfield’s coach, Jon Brown, a British marathoner who twice finished fourth at the Olympics. Rather than ramming into the proverbial brick wall, Brown suggested Findlay build up her training slowly. She remembers sessions in which she ran all of eight minutes, then 10 minutes.

“I said to Patrick, who was still my coach, ‘We need to continue doing the run build-up with Jon, because it’s really working for me.’ … About a week later, he said, ‘I can’t be a part of this anymore,’” Findlay said.

Kelly has not responded to repeated calls for comment. But his resignation wasn’t exactly a surprise to Alan Trivett, the executive director of Triathlon Canada. The dysfunction was clear enough in the preceding months that he said he’d engaged Kelly and Findlay in something akin to “marriage counselling.”

“I was concerned about it,” Trivett said. “He’s a 50-something-year-old guy and she’s a 23-year-old girl — what exactly are they going to have in common? There’s no denying that in a sport like this, when they’re spending so many weeks and months together, that it was going to be a challenge for them to see the world in the same way.”

Trivett said he regrets how Findlay’s hip injury was handled: He wishes he would have stepped in earlier to prioritize her return to health over her training volume. It wasn’t until early April — after Findlay had suffered the latest of a handful of recurrences of the hip problems — that Trivett insisted Findlay put hard training second to rehabbing the hip.

“I had Paula crying to me on the phone, ‘I cannot take days off. The Olympics are coming up,’ Trivett said. “I said, ‘Paula, right now health trumps everything.’ … I had four different occasions to actually make that call (sooner), and I didn’t do it. I beat myself a little bit every day to say, ‘If I’d only done this sooner, what would the difference have been?’ … We probably would have given her that extra four to eight weeks that she would have needed to be in medal-potential shape.”

Findlay referred to her hip injury as “a mystery.” Once diagnosed as a labral tear that would require surgery, she said more recent images contradict that diagnosis and surgery won’t be necessary. Right now, she said, the hip doesn’t hurt.

“I didn’t have that (Olympic) performance because I was limping and my hip was sore. I think some people think that,” she said. “(But) it’s the underlying reason I wasn’t ready physically for the demands of that race.”

Trivett, for his part, said Findlay was fit enough here to finish in the top 20 “with her eyes closed.”

He continued: “She just didn’t show up on the day mentally. A lot of athletes will look at that as though, ‘You’re slamming me.’ I’m not trying to slam her. It’s the one area we didn’t prepare her for as well as we should have. So I’ll take some responsibility myself. … We didn’t appreciate that her mental state would be incredibly fragile, and totally understandable.

“I think she just had a really bad day on the worst possible day.”

Beckie Scott knows the feeling. The cross-country skier who won Olympic gold and silver for Canada in 2002 and 2006 was among the throng at Hyde Park for Findlay’s race. Scott said she found it “hard to watch and very emotional,” in part because it brought back memories of her own first Olympics, in 1998 in Nagano.

“I remember suffering incredibly and wanting to cry the whole race, and finishing 45th, which was one of the last-place finishers,” said Scott in an interview. “But I’d say to Paula: If (the Canadian cross-country ski team) didn’t have those disastrous performances in Nagano, we would maybe not have succeeded the way we did in Salt Lake City. We learned so much from that failure, and we turned it around.”

Findlay, told of Scott’s sentiments, paused for a moment to consider them.

“It’s hard to imagine there could be any positive from this,” she said. “(But) those kinds of stories give me hope. I don’t want to give up. I still believe that I can get back to the top.”

To that end, Findlay has been training every day since she competed.

Swimming, cycling and running, she said “are like eating to me. I need to exercise every day. It makes me feel good.” She’s going at her own pace, without a coach to guide her. She’ll be in the market for a new coach, and a new training group, in the coming weeks. Her plan, she said, is to compete in the world championships in Auckland, New Zealand, in October. And as for 2013 — well, the world championships will be coming back here, to Hyde Park, where Findlay has already faced the scene of her devastation and lived to talk about it.

“To just do a little jog on that same course, it was like, ‘I’m not in a bad place,’” Findlay said. “I can’t be all superstitious and be like, ‘This course sucks.’ I’m going to be back here again soon. I will be back.”

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